This paper introduces an interactive surface concept for Mixed Reality (MR) tabletop games that combines a variable (LCD and/or projection) screen configuration with the detection of finger touches, in-air gestures, and tangibles. It is low-cost and minimally requires an ordinary table, a TV screen, and a Kinect v2 sensor. Existing applications can easily be connected by being compliant to standards. The concept is intended to foster further research on collaborative tabletop situations, not limited to games, but also in- cluding learning, meetings, and social interaction.

In order to enable a social agent to behave in a believable and realistic way, it needs a wide range of information in the form of both low-level value-based data as well as high-level semantic knowledge. In this work we propose a system that puts a virtual reality layer between the real world and an agent's knowledge representation. This mirror world allows the agent to use its abstract representation of the environment and inferred events as an additional source of knowledge when reasoning about the real world. Additionally, users and developers can use the mirror world, with its visualized data and highlighting of the agent's reasoning, for further understanding of the agent's behavior, debugging and testing, or the simulation of additional sensor input.

Some recent approaches in context-aware systems deploy on-tologies to benefit from their expressive power and extensive availability within the World Wide Web. However, wide-ranging ontologies tend to grow into large and complicated constructs, thereby making them difficult to maintain or reason on. In this work, we present a lightweight system design that combines the advantages of minimal, distributed or modularized ontologies with the computational power of a state-of-the-art real-time interactive system. Therefore, we introduce a simple data-structure called blueprints, that describes various reasoning operations to allow the dynamic integration of domain-specific knowledge for time-critical tasks, e.g. in multi-agent systems. Following this concept, we formulate four major use cases which are described through exemplary problems and proposed solutions. The presented design aims at porta-bility and adaptability, while maintaining real-time capability.

Degens, N., Endrass, B., Hofstede, G.J., Beulens, A., André, E.: What I See is Not What You Gettextquoteright: Why Culture-Specific Behaviours for Virtual Characters Should Be User-Tested Across Cultures.AI and Society. (2014).